Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 116263 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 581(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 388(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 116263 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 581(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 388(@300wpm)
“There is nothing for you to apologize for, Pax.” She hesitated like she was going to say more.
“What is it?”
Her head barely shook. “Nothing. I’m just thankful to be right here. Right now.”
My hand went to her head, fingers weaving in the locks of her long, black hair, caressing down until I was holding her by the back of the neck. “I just want to take care of you. Protect you.”
“You are. You are right here. Exactly where I need you.” The words were wisps, and the fingers she had on my face traipsed lower until she had them curled in my shirt. She drew me closer as she pressed her chest against mine. Desperate to erase the space. To fill the void that ached between us.
“I need you.” She whispered it like a prayer.
A plea that I felt like a punch to the gut.
“Aria.” It was restraint. A promise. A warning.
I knew I needed to unravel myself from where we were tied. Push her away and stop this recklessness before it spiraled out of control.
Before I did something I knew we would both regret.
But in that second, I could barely breathe. Could barely think. Everything was skewed by the greed that ran rampant.
It howled in my ears. Clouded my mind. Laid siege to my senses.
I was consumed with what it would be like to peel her from her clothes. Touch her. Sink into her.
Like she’d witnessed every salacious thought blaze through my mind, Aria whimpered a tiny needy sound, and her plump, swollen lips parted.
She arched. The peaks of her small tits were hard and pressing at my chest.
Electricity crackled and snapped, a bolt of lightning that shocked through the room.
Thunder came from a place that shouldn’t exist, and I swore I felt the ground tremble.
My palm spread wide as I let it rove down her shoulder and skim her side, and my fingers dug into her hip, somehow both pushing her away and drawing her closer. “You’re everything, Aria. I don’t think you know the way you changed everything the first time I saw you. Standing there in the doorway of your room in the facility . . . when I looked at you?”
My fingers burrowed deeper as the words scraped like shards from my mouth. “It wasn’t like being reborn. It was realizing why I was born in the first place.”
“You were the truth inside me when I never knew what was real. My hope. The hollow place inside that only you could fill,” she whispered.
Shifting, she dragged her leg over the top of mine, and those eyes flared as she purposefully rubbed herself over my cock, which had hardened to stone.
She gasped at the contact.
A thousand flames leaped.
Fuck me.
She’d barely brushed against me, but I thought I might pass out from the feel of her.
Sparks of pleasure shot up my spine, and lust rolled through my insides like liquid steel.
“And kissing you last night?” I said. “It’ll probably go down as the single most perfect moment of my life.”
Her teeth raked over her bottom lip like she could taste it. Like it was going to be the most perfect moment in her life, too.
Still, I was forcing out, “But we can’t do this, Aria.” The words were coarse. Gravel that scattered between us. “I crossed a line last night I never should have crossed.”
The promise I’d made to Ellis echoed through my mind.
“Protect her while awake. Stand at her side until we see this through. We will find it and destroy it here. But you must leave her then. Once this is finished. And you must never give in to what I see in your eyes.”
Aria peeled herself back.
It felt like I was being cut in two.
Both hurt and understanding were etched into every line on her face as she looked at me for one second before she rolled away, and the bed creaked as she sat up on the side, facing away from me.
I flopped onto my back, and I turned my focus to the ceiling like it might be able to staunch this ache. Soothe the way it felt like my chest might cave.
Or maybe . . . maybe if I looked hard enough, I might find a cure for who we were and who we were supposed to be.
When Aria’s words broke into the tense silence, they were so low, so quiet. “I was meant for you, Pax. We might have been told it’s wrong, but I know all the way to my soul that it’s not. How could you ever be wrong?”
Energy swirled around us, that connection that followed us into the deep. Into the darkness, and now into the light.
It crashed as it crested.
Wave after wave.
“I don’t know how many days I have left, but I do know that I don’t want to spend them in regret.” Her words were so quiet that they barely broke the air.